The A, B, C's of Dictatorship

Harvard prof and Foreign Policy columnist, Steven Walt, has a thoughtful essay, "10 Ways to Tell if Your President is a Dictator."

My fears about Trump’s foreign policy have always been two-fold: that he might pursue a more sensible grand strategy but do it incompetently, thereby weakening America’s international position, or that he will eventually get co-opted by the foreign-policy establishment and repeat the Blob’s most familiar mistakes. Based on some of his early appointments — like Islamaphobe Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security advisor — we might even get the worst of both worlds: unrealistic goals pursued ineptly.

But if you live in the United States, what you should really worry about is the threat that Trump may pose to America’s constitutional order. His lengthy business career suggests he is a vindictive man who will go to extreme lengths to punish his opponents and will break a promise in a heartbeat and without remorse. ...Nor does he regret any of the revolting things he did or said during the campaign, because, as he told the Wall Street Journal afterward, “I won.” For Trump, it seems, the ends really do justify the means.

Walt continues to list 10 warning signs ordinary Americans should watch out for after Trump takes over on January 20th. It's a long but worthwhile read. Follow the link above.

I've been pondering whether Trump might inadvertently do what the moribund Democrats have persistently failed to achieve? Could Trump mobilize the American left? How would it happen? Would it be left versus right? Might America fracture on generational lines - angry old white folks on one side, everyone else on the other?

Trump may unintentionally bring down the very power structure he now thinks he owns, creating the conditions by which he and his order are run out on a rail of unrest. He wouldn't have to check off many of professor Walt's 10 boxes to empower and energize a resistance determined to toss out their mostly corrupt government, Republican and Democrat.

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

Ask anyone in the Third World where, if they had their druthers, they would choose to live and their top choice, hands down, would be the United States. Ask those same people which nation is the greatest threat to world peace and they say, you guessed it, the United States.

That may sound contradictory but it's not.  It's the United States that's contradictory.  It's this great nation of wealth, comfort and ease that never seems to get its fill of raining death from above on other lands, especially the weakest ones.

The world doesn't look like us or like our southern cousins.  We're mainly white people but today white people make up just 16% of the world population.  That's just shy of one out of six.  People of colour make up the other 84%.  To them, "rich white guy" has a special meaning.

Now imagine you're one of them, the 84%, and you keep reading about the killings in Ferguson or Baltimore or New York City or any of the other American cities where white cops are blowing away their own people of colour who are usually underprivileged and poor.  Which one of those do you identify with?  The poor person of colour or the white cop in combat gear with military-grade firepower and a fiercely itchy trigger finger?

If you're one of the 84% these are not events that make you really comfortable with white folks, especially when they come to your homeland looking for something or someone - to buy or to kill - or when you hear those drones buzzing overhead carving circles in the sky.

I cringed when Ignatieff lauded America's "muscular foreign policy" and supported Canada implementing the same (as though with Harper at the helm there was any need for encouragement).  The thing with a muscular foreign policy is that it's like Christmas.  Far better to give than to receive. It's one thing in a unipolar world but it can be enormously corrosive of superpowerdom when other nations are ascendant, especially when they're nations "of colour."

In Foreign Policy, Chandran Nair writes that this spate of white cop on black killings is exposing the hypocrisy of American foreign policy:

A recent report states that in March 2014 alone, police encounters in the United States resulted in 111 killings, twice as many as were killed by British police in the entire 20th century. U.S. police disproportionately and excessively target minorities at traffic stops, and U.S. courts disproportionately and excessively convict minorities of crimes. “African American and Hispanics comprised 58 percent of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population,” according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — and the percentages of minorities in American prisons appear to be growing.

Until recently, many people around the world had believed that the United States had put its troubled history with race behind it. But how thin that veneer is became evident in August 2014, after the police shooting of a black teenager in the city of Ferguson, Missouri.The city’s chief of police resigned following a string of outrages, including the discovery of racist emails circulated within his police department that suggested Barack Obama “would not be president for very long because what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

This concerns more than just Americans. After all, what does it mean for the rest of the world when its most powerful nation struggles mightily with racism in its midst? For one, it contextualizes the often-heralded notion of American “exceptionalism.” At its core, that idea is an incredibly arrogant notion. It hints of racism and a barely concealed contempt of others, especially the non-Western world. But it is a doctrine that is still ruthlessly enforced in the carnival that is American politics.

...At a time when the United States has become the de-facto policeman of the world and a self-appointed arbitrator of peace, Asians have watched with concern — especially with elections looming in 2016 — at how the Republican Party has even swung further to the right. The GOP has stopped even pretending to concern itself with the welfare of non-white Americans. Many of its most prominent members display a very shallow understanding of the world and thus a lack of appreciation of the complex histories of other nations, yet seem itching to intervene on the slightest pretext. Worse, they would have the United States do so based on their prejudices and ideological fixations — some of which are likely framed by their fear of those unlike themselves.

...In Asia, many have not forgotten that the United States remains the only nation to ever deploy a nuclear weapon (twice), and did so on an Asian nation towards which many in the American leadership had deeply racist attitudes. They recall that Franklin D. Roosevelt interned roughly 90 percent of the continental Japanese-American population in prison camps during the war. His successor, Harry Truman, the man who ultimately pushed the nuclear button that brought World War II to an end, wrote to his wife: “I think one man is as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman.”

All of which makes it not unbelievable to think that an irrational fear of Islam — and denigration of Muslims — may also be the primary factor behind the fanatical determination of many in Washington to keep Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold. Fear and distrust of others can be found lurking in almost every corridor of power that influences U.S. foreign policy.

The rest of the world sees this. It smells the hypocrisy in Washington when leaders resort to the old saw that America “is a nation of immigrants” while kicking unaccompanied children out of the country en masse.

Unfortunately America has allowed itself to become the Plantation State of the 21st century.  As a developed nation it has no equal when it comes to inequality especially when put through the filter of white versus non-white.  FOX News and odious types like Rush Limbaugh reveal how expressions of overt racism are yet again in vogue in the US.  The face of America has turned very ugly to that 84%. This not only opens doors it paves entire roads for America's ascendant rivals, especially China.

There was a post-Civil War saying popular in the slave states, "the South shall rise again."  Too few Americans were smart enough to understand that as a warning.

The Top Ten Wars of 2015

Look, papa.  Visitors!

And a Happy New Year to you too.

The new president of the International Crisis Group, Jean-Marie Guehenno, has issued his own New Year greetings in an article on the ten wars to watch in 2015 in Foreign Policy magazine.

For the most part they're the old familiars that continue to plague Africa, the Middle East and Asia with two exceptions, Venezuela and Ukraine.  So, to summarize, here's the rundown.  No. 10 - Venezuela.  No. 9 - Libya and the Sahel.  No. 8 - Yemen.  No. 7 - Afghanistan.  No. 6 - the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).  No. 5 - Somalia.  No. 4 - Nigeria.  No. 3 - South Sudan.  No. 2 - Ukraine.  No. 1 - Syria, Iraq and the Islamic State.

You can follow the link to get the details.  What's important is that the list is not exhaustive nor does it reflect growing tensions elsewhere that could evolve into major wars in the coming years.  I found Guehenno's introductory comments most cogent:

Conflict is again on the rise after a major decrease following the end of the Cold War. Today’s wars kill and displace more people, and are harder to end than in years past.

The Arab world’s turmoil deepened: The Islamic State captured large swathes of Iraq and Syria, much of Gaza was destroyed again, Egypt turned toward authoritarianism and repression, and Libya and Yemen drifted toward civil war. In Africa, the world watched South Sudan’s leaders drive their new country into the ground. The optimism of 2013 faded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ebola ravaged parts of West Africa, and Boko Haram insurgents stepped up terrorist attacks in northern Nigeria. The international legal order was challenged with the annexation of Crimea by Russia, and war is back in Europe as fighting continues in eastern Ukraine.

So what do the last 12 months tell us is going wrong?

On a global level, increasing geopolitical competition appears, for the moment at least, to be leading to a less controlled, less predictable world. This is most obvious, of course, with regard to the relationship between Russia and the West. It’s not yet zero-sum: The two nations still work together on the Iran nuclear file, the threat of foreign terrorist fighters, and, for the most part, on African peacekeeping. But Russia’s policy in its neighborhood presents a real challenge, and its relationship with the United States and Europe has grown antagonistic.

China’s relations with its neighbors also remain tense and could lead to a crisis in the East or South China Seas. The struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia shapes the contours of violence between Sunnis and Shiites across the Middle East. Major Sunni powers are themselves divided: The contest between the Saudis, Emiratis, and Egypt on the one hand, and Qatar and Turkey on the other, plays out across North Africa. Elsewhere on the African continent, powers jostle in Somalia and in South Sudan’s increasingly regionalized war; and the DRC has long been a venue for its neighbors’ competition over influence and resources.

Rivalry between major and regional powers is nothing new, of course. But hostility between big powers has stymied the U.N. Security Council on Ukraine and Syria — and leaves its most powerful members less time and political capital to invest on other crises. As power gets more diffuse, antagonism between regional powers matters more. Competition between powerful states increasingly lends a regional or international color to civil wars, rendering their resolution more complex.

... jihadi groups remain a persistent, growing threat. The Islamic State and its new affiliates in Sinai and North Africa, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in Somalia and Kenya, and al Qaeda franchises in South Asia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Yemen, and the Sahel are destabilizing governments, killing civilians, and radicalizing local populations. But grouping these movements is often pointless: While they say their ambitions are global, diverse radical enterprises feed off local grievances.

Although these jihadist groups use horrific terrorist tactics, they are more than just terrorists. They seek to control territory. They often blend brutal tactics with astute political or social outreach. Some present themselves as alternatives to a corrupt and unjust state, providing basic public goods — particularly security and justice, albeit often cruel variants thereof — when a government has failed to do so. Few of the wars they fight in are initially driven by international jihad. Extremist ideology often comes late to the party, and always amid other sources of violence. But once there, it makes finding a mediated end to wars much more challenging.

Clearly such diverse problems don’t lend themselves to generic prescription. Solutions require a granular understanding of each conflict, its drivers, its protagonists, their motives and interests. Any response needs to be tailored to context. But we can offer a few general ideas based on the past year.

First, too often this year, policy has lacked a political strategy. This applies as much to the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State as it does to the Nigerians’ against Boko Haram. Military action won’t work alone; in fact, it often perpetuates underlying drivers of conflict — power inequalities, underdevelopment, state predation, identity politics and so forth. What keeps countries together are political settlements. Ending wars or avoiding crises requires a process that steers toward that.

Second, talking makes sense more often than not. The bright spots of this year — the Iranian nuclear file, Colombia’s peace talks, Tunisia’s transition, U.S.-Cuba relations — all show the value of dialogue, even when awkward or unpopular. Of course there are risks, particularly in talking to groups with exclusionary agendas or where criminal motives outweigh political ones. But at the moment the balance is dangerously weighted against dialogue: Policymakers need to be more flexible, eschew dogmatic declarations about who they can or cannot speak to, and where force is necessary, wed it with engagement, even if only to isolate those who are genuinely beyond the pale.

Third, political inclusion should more frequently be a guiding principle of today’s leaders. Over time, that means building institutions that are representative, effective, and protect all citizens — long, arduous, and intensely political work. In fragile countries, the rush to elections that empower the winner at the detriment of the loser, or to ratify constitutions that concentrate power in one individual are dangerous. Exclusion is a major driver in many of today’s wars — all main groups need a seat at the table to protect their interests.

Fourth, it is much better to prevent crises than to try to contain them later. This means engaging before local conflicts gain a jihadi dimension, for example. It means addressing communities’ grievances before they take up arms. It means trying to end wars before factions fragment, making peace efforts more difficult.

Particularly important is to shore up those states in troubled regions that are reasonably stable, or at least have not yet collapsed. This means making sure military aid does not entrench rulers and perpetuate bad habits. But it also means greater caution in advocating regime change, instead nudging leaders toward more inclusive politics, better provision of basic public goods and services, tackling corruption, and improving relations with neighbors. None of this is easy, particularly given the many crises occupying world leaders. But it is clearly better than picking up the pieces afterwards. In fact, given that that the world’s crisis management capacity is already at breaking point, a collapse in another region — like Central Asia, for example, or the Gulf — would be disastrous.

Guehenno's world view is reminiscent of what had been Canada's foreign policy approach pre-Harper.  If anything it serves as an indictment of the Harper-Baird "shoot'em up" approach to international relations with its black and white simplicity.

Our Most Worrisome Endangered, Perhaps Already Extinct, Species. World Leaders.

You know it.  I know it.  Even if you haven't really thought about it, you've probably sensed it.  As our world sails into an ever worsening storm, there's nobody at the helm.  Just when we need them most we find ourselves without real leaders.

Foreign Policy's Aaron David Miller contends that the leadership void reaches right into the White House.  He asks whether America has reached "Peak President"?  In a somewhat nihilistic approach, Miller argues that America is a nation that has moved beyond great leadership.

History, to be sure, is driven by the interaction between human agency and circumstance. Based on my own experiences in government and negotiations, individuals count greatly in this mix, particularly in matters of war, peace, and nation-building. Historian John Keegan made the stunning assertion that the story of much of the 20th century was a tale -- the biographies, really -- of six men: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, FDR, and Mao. Wherever you stand on the issue of the individual's role in history, its impact must be factored into the equation, particularly when it comes to explaining turning points in a nation's history.

...Today we are consumed with leaders and leadership as the solution, if not the panacea, to just about everything that ails us. We admire the bold, transformational leader who seeks fundamental change, and value less the cautious transactor who negotiates, triangulates, and settles for less dramatic results. And we tend to forget too that great leaders almost always emerge in times of national crisis, trauma, and exigency, a risk we run if we hunger for the return of such leaders. Still, in Holy Grail-like pursuit, we search for some magic formula or key to try to understand what accounts for great leadership. Indeed, we seem nothing short of obsessed with the L-word.

This focus on leaders is understandable, particularly during times of great uncertainty and stress. The psychologists and mythologists tell us that the need to search for the great leader to guide or even rescue us is an ancient -- even primordial -- impulse. But what happens when we reach for something we may no longer be able to have?

Indeed, these days, those who favor and align with ...the "Great Man" view of history -- myself included -- have a serious problem.

We are now well into the 21st century, a full 70 years after Keegan's six transformers either tried to take over the world or to save it. Look around. Where are the giants of old, the transformers who changed the world and left great legacies? Plenty of very bad leaders have come and gone -- Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic -- and some larger-than-life good ones too, like Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela.

We face a leadership deficit of global proportions. In fact, we seem to be pretty well along into what you might call the post-heroic leadership era.

Today, 193 countries sit in the United Nations, among them 88 free and functioning democracies. The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the so-called great powers -- the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia -- are not led by great, transformative leaders. Nor do rising states such as Brazil, India, and South Africa boast leaders with strong and accomplished records. We certainly see leaders who are adept at maintaining power and keeping their seats -- some, like Russia's Vladimir Putin and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for many years. Germany's Angela Merkel is certainly a powerful leader and skilled politician.

But where are those whom we could honestly describe as potentially great, heroic, or inspirational? And how many are not only great, but good -- with compassion and high moral and ethical standards -- too? Today, if I were pressed to identify a potentially great leader, I might offer up not a traditional head of state at all, but rather a religious figure: Pope Francis I, whose greatness as well as goodness may well be defined by the irony of his anti-greatness, commonness, and humility.

...great nations are supposed to have great political leaders too, right? And yet today in America we hear very little talk of greatness in our politics. Instead, the focus is on the leadership deficit, on America the ungovernable, and on the sorry state of its dysfunctional politics. One 2013 poll revealed that the public's view of Congress was significantly less positive than its view of root canal operations, NFL replacement refs, colonoscopies, France, and even cockroaches.

It should come as no surprise that the concern about the leadership deficit in our political class also extends to the presidency itself, an institution that has become, both for better and worse, the central element in our political system.

...The presidency has always been an implausible, some might even say an impossible, job. But the following mix of challenges and constraints -- some old, some new -- has made the post-World War II presidency harder still: constitutional and practical constraints on the office itself; the president's expanding reach and responsibilities; the expanding role of a government we trust less, even when we demand more from it; America's global role; and an intrusive, omnipresent, and nonstop media. 

Miller contends that the United States has had three, truly great presidents - Washington, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

...Each of the undeniably great presidents overcame a truly nation-wrenching challenge or crisis; each used his crisis moment to fundamentally alter the way we see ourselves as a nation and the way we govern ourselves too, and in doing so changed the nation forever for the better; and each in the process transcended narrow partisanship and in time came to be seen even by critics as an extraordinary national leader.

The presidents we judge to be great are very much with us still -- everywhere, really. They are on our money and monuments, stars of our HBO specials and Hollywood movies, and subjects of best-selling presidential biographies. They are everywhere, that is, except in the White House.

As we will see, what I describe as "traces of greatness," both real and perceived, have appeared in several of our more contemporary presidents. But those "traces" are not to be confused with the performance of the three undeniables or the handful of other top performers we hold in high esteem. The greatness ...belongs to an America of a different time and place, to a different country really. In the second part of the book, I explain why the history of the post-FDR presidency has been such a challenging tale, and why the times and circumstances have narrowed the prospects, the need, and the opportunity for sustained heroic action in the presidency. 

...Like the ghosts in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, great presidents continue to hover, to teach, and to inspire. And we have much to learn from their successes and failures. But there is a risk in thinking, let alone succumbing to the illusion, that we will see their likes again, even in an altered contemporary guise. The world and country have changed and so have we. And besides, we should not want to see them again. Greatness in the presidency is too rare to be relevant in our modern times and -- driven as it is in our political system by big crisis -- too risky and dangerous to be desirable. Our continued search for idealized presidents raises our expectations and theirs, skews presidential performance, and leads to an impossible standard that can only frustrate and disappoint. To sum up: We can no longer have a truly great president, we seldom need one, and, as irrational as it sounds, we may not want one, either.   

Perhaps our last great leader was Pierre Trudeau.  Like America, our great leaders are names from the distant past - Laurier, Pearson, St. Laurent, Cartier and MacDonald.  The thin gruel served up today is a bowl filled with petty technocrats that come in varying flavours of authoritarianism.  It's a bland and self-serving offering, devoid of vision, courage and commitment. 

And, perhaps just because I can't think of anywhere else to put it, here's Johnny Rotten on democracy and revolution. 

Canada's Militarized Foreign Policy

Perhaps the ultimate legacy of the Bush/Cheney regime was the militarization of America's foreign policy by which the use or threat of military force came to displace diplomacy as the principle instrument of foreign policy.  That Canada should succumb to this same contagion is as lamentable as it is inevitable in the era of neoliberalism.

Canada's militarized foreign policy could be summed up as, "we march to the sound of the guns." 

The nature of the war doesn't much matter.  We don't waste effort on the merits of what we're getting into, the objects we seek to attain or even how we'll get out of it and when.  Those questions are irrelevant when you enlist in the Global Hegemon's Foreign Legion. 

Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.  The difficult decisions we leave to others as we send our young men and women into harm's way. 

The Americans have opted for air war in Iraq and Syria.  Britain is in.  So too is Australia.  We hear the sound of their guns and so we march.

The merits of the war we assume to be self-evident from the participation of all the others with whom we seek no more than to stand shoulder-to-shoulder.  What we may or may not accomplish doesn't matter.  We quest only to "degrade" the enemy. 

Like good Legionnaires we're going, not to war, but into battle.  We'll do battle for six months.  At the end of that we'll decide whether to continue doing battle.  Wars are conflicts with outcomes that result in an end of hostilities.  Battles can be waged forever without any terminal outcome.

This is what befalls nations that enlist in the Global Hegemon's Foreign Legion.

It's Not That We Disagree, It's That I Despise Your Ideas

When ever I read another article and view another series of photographs of the carnage Israel has inflicted on the civilian population of Gaza and then think of the Netanyahu apologists, Trudeau and Mulcair, I despise them and any party that would tolerate much less follow their views.  That these two greasy opportunists haven't been tossed to the street for their blatant pandering tells me all I need to know about the Liberal Party and the New Democrats. 

Our general election is less than a year away, possibly much sooner if Harper sees a window of opportunity in which to catch the opposition off balance.  Trudeau is said to be the odds-on favourite and the ranks of non-Conservatives fairly swoon at the idea of someone "less worse" to replace Harper in ruining Canada.

We have, for years, been ruled by a despotic, manipulative, chronically secretive and dishonest, bully boy. Stephen Harper set out to dislocate Canada's political centre far and permanently to the right.  Fulsomely aided and abetted by the parliamentary lap dogs we still call Liberals and New Democrats, Stephen Harper has succeeded.  With the shameless collaboration of the so-called "opposition" parties, Canada is now firmly in the grasp of neoliberalism.  It's all free market capitalism from here on in and democracy and social justice be buggered. 

It is the fundamental duty of the Liberal and New Democrat leaders to campaign to restore Canada's political centre to its natural place.  Polls and studies show that, despite occasional claims to the contrary, the public remains slightly centre-left.  The Canadian people have been abandoned not just by the Conservatives but also the Liberals and New Dems.

"Less worse" is not an acceptable standard on which to support anyone and certainly not for the sake of replacing Harper with a Harper-lite.  That's merely substituting a coward for a fiend.  At the end of the day it may be a difference devoid of much distinction.

I understand all the arguments about how it is unwise for opposition parties to unveil policy in advance of an election campaign.  What puts the lie to that is the Green Party whose clear and sensible platform is available for all to see on its web site.  That platform sets a useful standard by which to measure both Liberals and New Democrats in the election that draws ever closer.  Prepare to be abjectly disappointed.

The 2015 election is not one that I look forward to if only because I expect disappointment on a grand scale from Harper's rivals. 

They'll make vague promises about electoral reform and call for more studies and position papers but the reform they can and should make if we're foolish enough to hand them the keys is voting reform in the Commons.  Anything that's not a confidence vote should be a free vote.  Whipped votes should be a last resort.

They'll probably support the already unviable bitumen mining industry with energy policies that are inconsistent, contradictory and unrealistic.  Mulcair says "no tankers" but I don't believe him for a minute.  If Canada is to make a meaningful effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change we will have to make hard decisions about the very future of Athabasca. 

They will ignore that other grave threat to Canada's democratic freedom - our corporate media cartel.  Only the Greens are honest enough to recognize this threat and call for a break up of the cartel through divestiture, the only effective way to undo toxic concentration of ownership and monopolistic cross-ownership of media outlets.  The Canadian people need the greatest diversity of voices expressing opinions of the widest range across the entire political spectrum.  That's how ideas and information are conveyed to nurture a genuinely informed public capable of exercising their political franchise. 

Inequality, that wrecking-ball of the middle class that corrodes social cohesion leaving the many vulnerable to the few, is getting scant attention from Trudeau or Mulcair.  I've not heard either of them acknowledge that most inequality has very little to do with merit or market-forces but is a largely legislated outcome arising from tax policy, subsidies and deferrals of all sorts, and the surrender of natural resources, the property of all Canadians, either free or at far-below market value.

I have yet to hear Mulcair or Trudeau acknowledge that fighting the scourge of inequality entails more than narrowing gaps in wealth and income but, even more, depends on bolstering equality of opportunity that requires rehabilitating our public education and healthcare systems.  If we want productive young people, we must ensure that they are able to access advanced education that is affordable.  We have to see funding health care and education not as a cost but as an investment.

They will avoid mentioning the urgent need to restore the balance between labour and capital so fundamental to the maintenance of social cohesion and prosperity.  Labour didn't abandon Andrea Horwath because it preferred Wynne's table manners.

They will not commit to the sort of national works programme Canada so badly needs to construct essential infrastructure capable of withstanding climate change impacts throughout this century.  We are struggling with infrastructure designed and built to cope with the climate we enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The Halocene is over.  The Anthropocene is here to stay.  Even 'early onset' climate change is already visiting us with severe storm events of increasing frequency, intensity and duration.  We have to invest an enormous sum of money into this because, if we don't, the costs and losses will be even greater.

We need a foreign policy more akin to what we had in the post-WWII decades, not the 'muscular' foreign policy so admired by Ignatieff and Harper.  The world is awash in guns and soldiers to wield them. It doesn't need Canada's paltry warfighting ability.  We can do far more good furnishing what has become so scarce today - superlative peacekeeping forces and global, "honest-broker" mediation.  We've gone the "All the King's horses and all the King's men" route.  We did it in Libya and Afghanistan.  Just marvel in awe at our grand successes.

These are all matters that speak to the future of Canada and the wellbeing of our people, both today and for generations to come.  These are matters beyond the myopia of neoliberalism.  We have lost invaluable time during Harper's machinations.  We don't have the luxury of squandering even more time on those who are in line to succeed him.

When Confidence Fails

Few who lived through the Cold War with its constant threat of nuclear annihilation realize the role confidence played in preventing an outbreak of apocalyptic hostilities.  Even at times when we thought the "other side" might be nearing the point of pre-emptive attack, we had a sufficient degree of confidence that they would do no such thing.  The Red Telephone that connected the White House to the Kremlin was specifically intended as an instrument for maintaining confidence.

The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the leadership needed to maintain confidence - and peace - in stressful circumstances.  Kennedy was being pulled by contradictory advice given by competing forces some of which demanded a shooting war.  In the end, Kennedy's confidence in Khrushchev prevailed and a diplomatic result was obtained but it was a very close call.

Today I sense that we have discounted the importance of confidence and confidence-building between major powers.  Under Bush/Cheney, America drove NATO right up to Russia's doorstep.  That was an act of diplomatic aggression that showed no interest in maintaining, much less building, confidence between west and east. It was both a threat to Russia and a humiliation of Vlad Putin. Imagine if Russia reached a pact with Mexico and wound up parking tanks, surface to air missile batteries and mobile rocket artillery along the south bank of the Rio Grande.

What has the Ukraine conflict become?  It resembles a proxy war reminiscent of the Cold War era.  We support the west-leaning government that ousted the previous democratically-elected (yet horribly corrupt) government in a coup. Putin sees us as interlopers, meddlers, once again wreaking mischief at Russia's doorstep.  That he took Crimea should have been expected.  That he should support pro-Russia rebels seeking to pry loose the Donetsk region is equally predictable.

It's probably safe to say that the confidence level between Putin and western leaders has fallen into an abyss.  We have imposed successive waves of sanctions against Russia and its leaders.  We have actually threatened Russia with dire consequences that await if it doesn't leave Ukraine alone.  NATO Secretary General Anders "Foggy" Rasmussen, an avowed and bellicose neoliberal, is using the final months of his tenure to get straight into Putin's face.  He gives the impression that he's just itching to see NATO jets over the Ukraine before he's put out to pasture.  There are plenty of other prominent hawks in Rasmussen's camp including our own warrior-prince, Stephen Harper.

The German financial newspaper, Handelsblatt, recently warned that the people of the west are being "mentally mobilized" for war by our corporate mass media cartel.  This could hardly have gone unnoticed by the Kremlin.

And what happens when confidence plummets?  Rearmament is one usual result. Rearmament that further undermines confidence.  Russia is rearming with a new strategic bomber, a new ballistic missile that may breach one or more of its treaty obligations, two new submarine designs and a dandy new stealth fighter designed to turn F-35s into lawn ornaments.  Is this a Russian provocation? Hardly.

America kicked off today's arms race when Bush/Cheney introduced the incredibly bellicose Bush Doctrine that threatened friend and adversary alike with the use of pre-emptive and overwhelming military force against any country or group of countries that should deign to rival America militarily or economically.  That was accompanied by a massive increase in military spending focused on achieving enormous technological advances that would leave all other nations so far behind that they couldn't catch up.  Out of that depraved mentality emerged the F-35.

For Beijing, a real confidence-buster came with the staging of "Operation Chimichanga", a full scale, dress rehearsal of a pre-emptive "first strike" stealth attack on China to render the Peoples Republic defenceless.  Provocative, yes. Confidence building, plainly not.

America is doing no end of sabre-rattling and we're playing our part in it also.  Our foreign policy has been subsumed into America's.  The F-35 is our admission ticket into America's Aerial Foreign Legion.  There's a reason American commanders refer to it as their "kick in the front door weapon."

On this, the centenary of World War One, it's important to remember that not all wars are intended or even desired.  History shows it's remarkably easy for leaders to back us into wars of durations and dimensions that were never foreseen.  It doesn't take much - an arms race here or there, sabre-rattling and other provocations, a power vacuum real or perceived, the "mental mobilization" of society - go ahead, light the fuse.

Without seeming to recognize it, we're creating an incredibly dangerous world packed with stressors such as arms races; geo-political transitions with contested spheres of influence; power vacuums and the rise of failed states; militarized foreign policy; economic, resource and territorial rivalries; and, of course, early onset climate change impacts, all under the umbrella of western neoliberalism. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's What The F-35 is Really About. Canada's First, First-Strike Air Force

It's about one thing - a sneak attack against China.  And that's just what the United States Air Force had in mind when it conducted Operation Chimichanga.  Wired magazine's military correspondents David Axe and Noah Shachtman described what is on American military planners' minds.

"The first sign of the coming U.S. air raid was when the enemy radar and air-defense missile sites began exploding. The strikers were Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, flying unseen and faster than the speed of sound, 50,000 feet over the battlefield. Having emptied their weapons bays of super-accurate, 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs, the Raptors turned to engage enemy jet fighters rising in defense of their battered allies on the ground.

"That’s when all hell broke loose. As the Raptors smashed the enemy jets with Amraam and Sidewinder missiles, nimble Air Force F-16s swooped in to reinforce the F-22s, launching their own air-to-air missiles and firing guns to add to the aerial carnage.

"With enemy defenses collapsing, B-1 bombers struck. Several of the 150-ton, swing-wing warplanes, having flown 10 hours from their base in South Dakota, launched radar-evading Jassm cruise missiles that slammed into ground targets, pulverizing them with their 2,000-pound warheads. Its weapons expended, the strike force streaked away. Behind it, the enemy’s planes and ground forces lay in smoking ruin.

"The devastating air strike on April 4 involved real warplanes launching a mix of real and computer-simulated weapons at mock targets scattered across the U.S. military’s vast Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex near Fort Yukon, a tiny former fur trading post, population 583. “Operation Chimichanga,” as the exercise was reportedly designated, was the first-ever test of a new Air Force long-range strike team combining upgraded Lockheed Martin F-22s and Boeing B-1s carrying the latest air-launched munitions, along with old-school fighters, tankers and radar planes for support.

"China is steadily improving its air defenses. To make sure the bombers can get through, the Air Force plans to send fully-stealthy warplanes in first. The Northrop Grumman B-2 stealth bomber is the ideal trailblazer, as it proved over Libya when three B-2s knocked out the bulk of Libya’s radars, missiles and airfields in a single pass. But the Air Force possesses just 20 B-2s, only a handful of which are combat-ready at any moment.

"So the F-22 fills in. With the latest Increment 3.1 upgrade, the F-22s can lob 250-pound, Boeing-built Small Diameter Bombs at least 60 miles with pinpoint accuracy, a capability apparently tested out during Operation Chimichanga. The Raptor-bomb combo “was critical to follow-on forces completing their missions,” F-22 commander Kunkel said.

"But even the F-22 is in short supply. So far only one Alaska-based squadron has the Increment 3.1 Raptors. When the upgrade is complete, around 150 F-22s will be able to carry the tiny, precise bomb — still a relatively small force for taking on potentially thousands of Chinese radars, missiles and jet fighters. The smaller F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to give the Air Force stealth capability in large numbers, but the F-35 is tens of billions of dollars over-budget and five years behind schedule."

Axe and Shachtman are right, you can't wage much of an air war on China with just 150 F-22s.  That's a job that's going to require many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of F-35s.   That's what the F-35 is, a stealth light bomber, a purely offensive, first-strike weapon.   Air defence of Canada?  C'mon, please.   There's nothing remotely defensive about the F-35.   For the first time in our country's history we're going to be left with a purely offensive, first-strike air force.  Maybe that doesn't bother you but it should for it says much about the path of Canada's foreign policy into the next thirty years.

If We Only Had a Brain

Iggy likes it. Harper likes it and knows his Senior Partner likes it. At least some of us like it or think we do. Yet nobody much wants to talk about it or what it means.

It is the militarization of Canada's foreign policy. That, in turn, means shooting and shelling and bombing the hell out of some place well removed (we hope) from home. Sure it sounds great, in theory, but how does it translate into reality?

Earlier this week we learned that the Canadian Forces are going to have to wait until 2015 for delivery of their first, Predator-style, armed aerial drones. The story, the only one I've read, focused on the delay and skipped over the important part, the intent.

What in hell does Canada need with missile-firing aerial drones? Where do we expect to need them and when? I'd like to think we're not going to be turning those missiles on anyone at home and I doubt we're planning on using them on anyone within drone range of Canada either because that would pretty much be the United States and, after all, the hillbillies have all the guns. So that must mean we're planning on deploying them abroad and that must mean we foresee a reasonable need for these expensive, high-tech toys in a combat scenario overseas in the reasonably near future. Which then begs the questions - where are we fixing to wage war, against whom and roughly when?

There are all sort of collateral ramifications to militarizing Canada's foreign policy. It's not enough to have the toys. You have to have the means and the ways to get those toys where you need them when you need them there and that means a lot of resources, a lot of personnel, and an awful lot of dineros. You have to invest heavily in that supporting infrastructure well before you decide to flex those muscles and you have to keep that infrastructure in a relatively high state of readiness if you want to get your toys to the blood-soaked sandbox on the other side of some ocean while they can still find somebody to whack. Sure we bought a few C-10 military transports but they're just the tip of the iceberg on this sort of warfighting capability.

Now unless you're a theocratic nutjob or an Igophile, you'll realize that if there's one sort of foreign policy where Canada cannot chart its own course, it's the guns'n ammo stuff. We're just too small a player. That means we can only use those drones in support of a senior partner, a major player. Think "coalition of the willing." Think America. Think Foreign Legion. For a country the size of Canada, armed drones are something you buy so that you can fight in support of somebody else's war.

Every nation's military war games and comes up with contingency plans for warfighting. We even have one for what we'll do when the Americans come pouring across our border... just in case. What are the contingencies in which we foresee the use of these drones? In conjunction with what other weaponry and forces? In association with what other nations? Under the command of what foreign power? Against what possible nation or group of nations? For how long? At what cost?

Aren't you just a bit curious about all these questions? I sure am and I'd like to think they're being asked and discussed - and they're not. After all, we're talking about the future of Canada and our posture toward the rest of the world during what promises to be a highly unstable and dangerous century. Maybe to ask and answer those questions would bring up a lot of issues we simply don't want raised in the public's mind.

This is the time we could sure use an opposition to force these things to be debated in Parliament. Nah, forget I even mentioned it.

Think Tanks? Think Again

Almost every day there's some breathtaking study from this think tank or that authoritative sounding institute or centre. Some of them have become infamous during the Bush/Cheney regime - outfits like the Project for the New American Century or the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute which are shameless shills for the neo-con fantasy of American global domination.

Don't worry, there are also plenty of think tanks that are disguised vehicles to shill for leftwing causes. They don't have the power (def'n: "money" - see lobbyists) of the big rightwing propaganda mills but they can be equally disingenuous.

You see, today you can find a reputable sounding institute or foundation or centre willing to champion just about any cause you care to promote. That's because there are now roughly FIVE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED public policy organisations which aim to “bridge the gap between knowledge and policy” in both security and non-security areas. Fifty four hundred and counting according to the list compiled by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philly, an institute in the form of a think tank to ponder think tanks. Neat, eh?

How do you make sense of this morass of sometimes agenda-driven opinion makers? A good start is to follow the advice given Polonius to his departing son Laertes, "Take each man's censure but reserve thy judgment."

A good way to start is to find just a few that are internationally recognized for their scholarship and objectivity. Two of my favourites are the Royal Institute ("Chatham House") and the International Crisis Group. There are a number of others that I like but I'm not absolutely certain that I am able to give them the same endorsement so they'll go unmentioned.

If you're interested, the Foreign Policy Research Institute has a directory (seemingly endless) of the world's abunance of think tanks. Visit them here: http://www.fpri.org/

So, here is the FPRI's overall Top 10 Think Tanks Globally:

Centre for European Policy Studies (Belgium)
French Institute for International Relations (France)
German Institute for International Politics and Security (Germany)
Institute of World Economy and International Relations (Russia)
International Crisis Group (Belgium)
International Institute for Strategic Studies (UK)
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (Israel)
Japan Institute of International Affairs (Japan)
Royal Institute of International Affairs (UK)
Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China)

It is sort of interesting to note that, while North America has nearly 1,900 or about 40% of the think tanks listed, not one of them makes the Top Ten list.